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Abstract-Nowadays integrated circuit reliability is challenged by both variability and working conditions. Environmental radiation has become a major issue when ensuring the circuit correct behavior. The required radiation and later analysis performed to the circuit boards is both fund and time expensive. The lack of tools which support pre-manufacturing radiation hardness analysis hinders circuit designers tasks. This paper describes an extensively customizable simulation tool for the characterization of radiation effects on electronic systems. The proposed tool can produce an in depth analysis of a complete circuit in almost any kind of radiation environment in affordable computation times.

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Ring oscillators are used in many applications, but for all of them the system output is a clock signal with a 50% duty cycle. Our work sets the analytical basis for understanding and designing a ring oscillator whose outputs are clock signals with fully-configurable duty cycles different from 50%. We present two models in order to vary the output duty cycle with reduced area overhead: the first model is based on the layout design, focusing on the transistor sizing of each inverter gate; and the second model establishes a relation between the output duty cycle and different bias voltage schemes. These models are validated by simulation with a 40 nm commercial technology. The simulations include the impact of variability and the characterization of the oscillator phase noise. We also discuss the utilization of our new approach in many different applications for heterogeneous environments.

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